I have been working with Oracle 10g (and mySQL 5.1/5.5), and have come to some interesting conclusions regarding the Oracle SQL, as well as PHP.

Oracle’s SQL language has its own variant – SQL*Plus. While I won’t get into the gritty details right here, is should be evident that Oracle doesn’t do things half-way. They have pretty much retro-fitted SQL in order to fit their specifications. Oracle’s SQL works and works well.

The great thing about 10g is that it presents with a pretty fantastic GUI system, kind of like Cognos and mySQL Workbench 5.2 all wrapped together in a smooth Oracle shell. I don’t mean to gush about the GUI, but I put it up there with Joomla!‘s user-friendly GUI for smoothness. As far as DBA stuff, that still needs to be learned, and no GUI will ever make the learning curve go down.

In the area of freely deployed database software, 10g Express (the system that I am using) is free of charge, and has all the standard 9i versatility. 10g Express has a limited footprint, so you may not want to roll it out as your production foundation. On the other hand, I don’t think that I have ever had a system reach 5GB in size – I am not sure what this says about the scope of my system designs. I will need to double-check my Joomla! sites, but that would be quite the website (Joomla! runs on mySQL anyways, but hey…)

It is doubtful that Oracle 10g will ever become the basis of numerous open-source systems, since the combination of marketing restrictions and the open-source databases (mySQL 5.5 and its ilk) present such intense competitive factors. That said, 10g is a great platform to learn on, and definitely presents an alternative to standard mySQL.

I guess that I should end on a note: mySQL is also an Oracle product, and there are other free database systems available. mySQL 5.5 was released in 2011, and mySQL is designated to remain open-source until 2015. After that, Oracle is likely to cinch down ever so tightly on their now-copywritten (non-open-source) work, with all the chaos that this would cause. When the time comes, be prepared to make the shift from mySQL, BerkeleyDB, or 10g to a cheaper alternative.